With the Carousel of Time
by That Endless Mania
Summary: He takes her place with surprising grace, and assumes his cocky air even in the body of a breakable infant. He pushes her on, he tells her to live, tells her to be more lady like in the future. ColoLal.


**With the Carousel of Time  
**_(We Go Round and Round and Round)_

* * *

Lal is three.

She rips the heads off her Barbie dolls, destroys her frilly smocks (she's not picky with her weapon of choice, though usually it involves a great deal of pee and defecation), bites her hair to brazenly short lengths and draws moustaches on her Disney Princesses. She does so with triumph.

Lal may be a girl, but she's going to make her parents regret, wholeheartedly, for not giving her that y-chromosome.

* * *

Lal is ten.

In the conservative neighbourhood she lives in, any mention of her name cues, quite inevitably, a great deal of head shaking, sighing, and things like 'she's-pretty-and-its-a-shame,it's-a-damn-shame'. Her mother is at her wits end, but there is nothing the poor woman can do but to rub the sweat and dirt stains (mementos from hours of playing in the mud) out of her shirts.

* * *

Lal is thirteen.

Lal learns to outrun any boy; to shoot rubber bands at anyone who dares to touch her; that should 'her blasphemous actions continue, she will never, ever, get a date'.

(But Lal doesn't care, because she is Lal, because she has long since traded feminism for her freedom.)

* * *

Lal is eighteen.

She enters the best military school there is without much protests. Her parents are beyond caring.

Lal spends the best days of her life there; she ignores the taunts of her male contemporaries (not because she's tolerant or anything, but because she can always get her sweet revenge during combat training later), holds her head high, and it's not long before she commands the awe of the male populace.

She eventually gets accepted as an invaluable comrade; the men sees her as a fighter, and not a woman. She likes that.

(Meanwhile, the debates are still on as to whether her father is Satan, or if she is, in fact, a direct descendant of Hitler.)

She doesn't acknowledge these theories. But she also takes pride in not denying them.)

* * *

Lal is twenty-two.

She rises up the rungs of the daunting military ladder, with her prodigious marksmanship, her keen, analytical mind and her second-to-none combat abilities. She becomes quieter, but she still manages to carry a certain grace, an infallible dignity that no man can ever master.

She's in charge of training the rookies, and she enjoys the challenge. She works them hard – too hard – but she knows that her men will thank her for that someday, when they emerge from the battlefield, bloodied and jaded but ultimately victorious.

* * *

_Some days, though, she feels a little lonely, and that loneliness tears her up, bit by bit by bit. _

* * *

Lal is twenty-three.

Lal meets Colonello.

Lal gets majorly pissed off, because he's the only wild horse she can't tame. He's too bright; too loud; too unrestrained. He uses his rule book only for sanitary purposes (i.e. when they run out of toilet paper, which happens frequently during missions), questions everything she says, and - she finds this the most disturbing by far – never knows when to back down. He's always around her, determined to suck out her indifference and coldness. He almost – almost – succeeds.

(And deep down, Lal wants to be a lady again.)

* * *

Lal is twenty-four.

Lal learns that she only has three months before she gets to fufill her role in the Acrobaleno Curse.

Lal is angry, confused, and melancholic. Most of the days, she wants nothing more than to forget her bleak future, to lie on the ground, to soak up the sun and the wind and the rain, while she still can.

* * *

Lal is three again.

This time there's no Barbie for her to chew; no frilly dresses for her to pee on. This time, it's blood and gore and violence and the Mafia Game, except it's not really a game, not when her family has a total of thirteen thousand (and that's only at the last count) enemies, prowling in the shadows and waiting for a chance to slip mercury down her throat.

Colonello is still there.

He takes her place with surprising grace, and assumes his cocky air even in the body of a breakable infant. He pushes her on, he tells her to live, tells her to be more lady like in the future. Naturally, he subjects himself to an unnecessary round of beatings again.

* * *

_(Your last memory of him is of the two of you standing on the cliffs; of that wolfish, cheeky grin; of that electric hair and startling blue eyes; of an idiot apologizing ('sorry, I wanted to save you in a cooler fashion) even though he didn't need to; of something that you can't place a finger on; of dappled sunlight; of a stirring in that feminine heart you had long forgotten.)_

* * *

**This was cross posted from livejournal. In all honesty, it had a very poor reception back there. **

**I hardly cross post anything from livejournal, but I just want to have more views on this particular piece. I loved writing it, though looking back, it _is _rather flawed. I thought that I might have touched a little too much on the idea of feminism - after all, Lal is a _tomboy_, not a feminist - and perhaps that was where I went wrong, but I really don't know. **

**So - comments?**


End file.
